The Scene's second annual culinary showdown, Iron Fork, kicks off with five spicy chefs

To win the coveted Iron Fork—the pronged talisman awarded to the victor in the Scene's annual death-cage match of culinary virtuosity—a chef needs something more than skill. You need something more than oven mitts and a sharp set of knives. You need the luck of the draw.

We refer, of course, to the wild card that makes Iron Fork a test of any chef's ingenuity—but we'll get to that in just a moment. The evening works like this: Five chefs have one hour to prepare a multiple-course meal. Chefs can bring one sous chef and up to 10 spice blends and cooking agents. At the end of the hour, the chefs will present their concoctions to the panel of judges—including last year's inaugural Iron Fork victor, Zola's Deb Paquette—who will score the plates based on taste, creativity and presentation. (Say, this would make an exciting TV show!) The winner will take home the coveted Golden Fork, along with a set of Le Creuset cookware.

But there's a catch. Every course must include a secret ingredient, unknown to the participants until the contest begins. And whatever that gustatory X is, it will play to somebody's strengths. Not everybody can MacGyver a sorbet out of a fiddlehead fern.

So when five of Nashville's most popular and colorful chefs face off next Wednesday at the Country Music Hall of Fame, the evening promises to be a battle of personalities and showmanship as well as a culinary showdown. Who will walk away with the Fork is anyone's guess. The odds are dead even. Jimmy the Greek would toss up his gyro in despair. But we can offer some inside tips on how the competition might go down, depending on that mystery ingredient.

There's no denying that Jeremy Barlow of tayst, Guerry McComas of Yellow Porch, Tandy Wilson of City House, Bart Pickens of Saffire and Jason Love of Ombi will bring unique culinary styles to the battle royal in Kitchen Coliseum. But they also bring a lot of shared history. Consider this: Barlow and McComas are both alumni of the renowned Inn at Blackberry Farm. Love and Wilson both worked for chef Margot McCormack of Margot Cafe, and Love and Barlow once ladled lemon-artichoke soup together in the Lilliputian kitchen at Midtown Café. Love trained with McComas at Yellow Porch. And Pickens, riding in from The Factory at Franklin, will be back on home turf when he hits the Country Music Hall of Fame. As executive chef of the TomKats family of restaurants, Pickens logged plenty of time in the kitchen of SoBro Grill, which serves as the museum's restaurant and catering hub.

While their intersecting cooking lineages will no doubt infuse the chefs' creativity, a lot depends on the secret ingredient and the items in the pantry, provided by Delvin Farms and Whole Foods, which could give any one of the contestants an advantage.

Take pork, for example. If any part of a pig ends up on the counter, tip the odds toward Tandy Wilson. The chef/owner of City House knows swine and has a pig tattoo to prove it. At his rustically urban art studio-turned-restaurant in Germantown, Wilson cures his own salami and ham, showcasing them in rough-hewn Italian-influenced dishes such as pizza with belly ham, mozzarella, Grana Padano, oregano and chilies. Wilson's commitment to the old-school foodways earned him a nod from the James Beard Foundation earlier this year, when he was nominated in the category of Best Chef in the Southeast.

Ombi's Jason Love also will be as happy as a pig in shiitakes if pork ends up on the table. Before taking over the kitchen at the sleek Elliston Place eatery, Love studied at the cloven hoof of the master, Laura Wilson. A devotee of pig aficionado and culinary author Michael Ruhlman, she led the Ombi team in countless porcine adventures—including head cheese and Rocky Mountain corn dogs—before passing the toque to Love this spring. An ordained minister in the Church of Spiritual Humanism and one of nine children, Love is known for spinning yarns about rabbit husbandry, randy llamas and a trip to a beauty pageant in Mumbai. It's safe to say he'll be telling some tales in Iron Fork's Kitchen Coliseum, so you might want to lean in close to see and hear the action.

If Iron Fork takes to the seas with any sort of secret swimming ingredient, you might put your money on Bart Pickens. An import from New Orleans, Pickens gravitates toward aquatic dwellers such as softshell crawfish, which he treats with Cajun flair. Take a glance at the Saffire menu—with its Kiss Yo Mama catfish, sorghum-glazed salmon and other sustainable seafood—and you'll expect Pickens to make waves in his Hall of Fame home stream. We'll be keeping an eye on him to make sure his former SoBro crew isn't in the wings running interference for him.

If you hear pyrotechnics in the kitchen, it could be Yellow Porch chef McComas, who has been known to lob little firecrackers at his team to liven things up. A diehard bacon-lover who got his culinary start scrubbing dishes and assisting the pitmaster at Bar-B-Cutie before attending the Culinary Institute of America, McComas also has a deft hand with seafood, practiced in San Francisco, Nantucket and Switzerland. Now stationed on the scenic coast of Thompson Lane, McComas delivers an eclectic surf-and-turf menu flavored with fresh herbs from the bountiful parking lot garden.